Six years ago three foremost students of contentious action, Doug
McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, published a path-breaking work,
Dynamics of Contention, or "DOC" as it came to be known. DOC
was exasperating, challenging, ambitious, densely-argued, sometimes
inscrutable, and widely influential among social scientists. It argued
that revolutions, civil wars, military coups, violent ethnic conflicts,
bread riots, and social movements were all related phenomenon subject to
a common set of explanatory mechanisms and processes. It also championed
a relatively new social-science methodology. Explanations that
understand the world in terms of a concatenation of causal mechanisms
supersede explanations that classify phenomenon as instances of
universal laws. DOC analyzed political contention in a series of case
studies, each chapter illustrating some different causal mechanisms and
showing how these mechanisms might be used to explain the individual
cases.

The present book, written by two DOC authors, is an important
clarification and significant extension of DOC's arguments as well
as a how-to manual for practitioners. This effort to fashion detailed
and case-specific yet highly-analytical explanations of contentious
politics should interest historians concerned with social protest fully
as much as sociologists and political scientists.

Beginning with cases of claim-making, the core of contention,
Tarrow and Tilly argue that social-science explanation relies on the
identification of mechanisms defined as "events that produce the
same immediate effects over a wide range of circumstances." An
example of a mechanism is "brokerage"--the production of a new
connection between previously unconnected or weakly connected sites.
Brokerage is seen in the Pinochet affair of 1998 when the retired
Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, traveled to London. His trip
was interrupted when a Spanish magistrate investigating the torture of
Spanish citizens in Latin America issued an extradition order, and U.K.
authorities arrested and held Pinochet. Ultimately Pinochet was released
but an enormous amount of publicity had been generated, exposing the
brutality of Chilean dictatorship. Pinochet's ordeal was the work
of political brokers. exiles from his regime, protesting his dictatorial
rule. Scattered throughout Europe but retaining mutual ties, networks of
Chilean political immigrants served as "brokers" working
together to bring evidence from Chile to use against Pinocher, to reveal
the dictator's presence in London to Spanish authorities, and to
lobby for British action. Brokerage is key to understanding the Pinochet
affair.

Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow argue that, within a well-defined
historical and sociological context, mechanisms like brokerage and
processes--combinations of mechanisms--are key in understanding protest.
An important example of a process is mobilization which includes the
mechanisms of diffusion, brokerage, certification, and boundary
activation. Mobilization can be seen in the Italian strike waves of
1968-1972. The first initiative came from Marxist-influenced university
students who framed their protests as labor demands but had only very
weak contacts with workers. With time however students' example and
their demands began to spread, particularly among less skilled workers;
at first strikes were concentrated in the north but soon spread south
(diffusion). As unskilled workers increased their wages, skilled workers
reasserted their identity and social status and struck to preserve wage
differentials (boundary activation). New self-styled
"revolutionary" organizations formed that included both
students and workers, and these organizations established contacts among
different factories encouraging strike coordination (brokerage). The
socialist party, then in a coalition government, prevented the
repression of this increasingly militant labor movement. In turn,
recognition by authorities certified these militant actions as
legitimate, encouraging others to follow (certification). Mobilization
increased until strike defeats, increased repression, changing political
opportunities and disillusionment began a process of demobilization.

While mechanisms and processes are dynamic elements and contentious
protest emerges from the interaction of protestors, protestors'
targets and the authorities, Tilly and Tarrow integrate important
structural elements into their analyses. Because it constituted a
powerful new contribution to research on contention, DOC emphasized
mechanisms and processes but this emphasis sometimes left readers
puzzled about the role of context and of structure in the overall
argument. In this book the dynamic elements inherent in causal
mechanisms are more balanced by structural factors than in DOC. For
example, Tilly and Tarrow give more attention to state structure and the
ways it shapes protest. One post-DOC distinction in this book is that of
the horizontally segmented regime like Northern Ireland where social
movement protests exist alongside lethal ethnic conflicts, another is
the transnationally composite state like Israel where national social
movements exist alongside violent groups with transnational connections.
These may prove fruitful starting points for further research. The
treatment of global contentious politics is brief but suggestive. It
suggests that increasing internationalization--the growth of ties among
states as well as the growth of ties between states and supranational institutions--increases the opportunities for global contention by
transnational groups.

Although neither book relies heavily on anything beyond recent
modern history, Tilly and Tarrow's argument has an essentially
historical cast, and this tendency in their argument is reinforced by
their methodology. Concepts present in DOC and reemerging in this book,
such as repertoires--the types of protests known and available to
protestors--depend at least in part on cultural historical analyses. The
focus on case-study approaches and unique outcomes characteristic of
explanations that stress mechanisms and processes should find sympathy
and support among historians.

This book expounds some important new ideas about the varieties of
protest in a manner entirely readable by undergraduates. The chapter on
social movements sketches out a broader and more encompassing view than
anything else on offer. The last two sections of this book, confusingly
labeled appendices, are something between glossaries of important ideas
and rough drafts for uncompleted chapters. Relegating these
proto-chapters to the nether world of appendices is unfortunate for they
contain elements of an agenda for future research. Appendix A is
particularly interesting because it breaks down some of the elements of
context and relates them to dynamic causal mechanisms.

This is a masterful exposition of a grand argument that should
interest all historians concerned with protest. For a broad audience, it
summarizes simply many basic DOC ideas but it actually presents a
broader synthesis than DOC itself. A sense of work in progress pervades
the whole and is one of the book's charms.

Michael Hanagan

Vassar College

COPYRIGHT 2008 Journal of Social History
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.